Tort King Calls Flu Remedy Just Expensive Water

HACKENSACK, N.J. (CN) — A New Jersey tort king has sued a North Carolina homeopathic health company, claiming its flu remedy is little more than a 2-oz. bottle of water.

Harold Hoffman, an attorney in Englewood, N.J., claims in his May 1 class action that King Bio sold Dr. King’s Natural Medicine Multi-Strain Flu Relief through “bogus fabrications, lacking in even a scintilla of scientifically objective truth” and that the product “contains nothing but water.”

The product comes in a 2-oz. spray bottle and typically retails for about $14. Hoffman says the company pushes it as a cure and prevention of flu, fatigue, headache, nausea, fever, body aches, vomiting and diarrhea.

He says the product does contain duck liver extract, diluted trillions of times to the point that only water remains.

“In light of the foregoing extreme dilution process, the resulting formulation contains not even microscopically detectable components of the original active ingredient,” Hoffman says in the complaint. “Simply stated, defendant markets water for flu relief.”

Customer reviews on Amazon.com and other online sites are largely positive, with reviewers writing such accolades as “if you do happen to get sick, you will be better within one day” and “this stuff is AWESOME.”

Hoffman doesn’t buy it, or homeopathy in general.

“Homeopathy violates basic principles of physics, chemistry, and biology,” he says in the complaint, citing a 2015 Australian government study and other experts who say homeopathy generally acts as a placebo.

“The idea that water remembers what was once in it is almost comical,” Hoffman adds.

He seeks class certification and treble damages for multiples counts of consumer fraud, misrepresentation and concealment.

Homeopathy is controversial, a medical doctor told Courthouse News, as it is based upon practitioners seeking a natural substance that produces the symptoms from which a patient suffers, then prescribing minuscule doses of the substance that induces those symptoms.

Kings Bio was founded in 1989 by Frank King, a fourth-generation family farmer in North Carolina who has degrees in chiropracty and naturopathic healing.

“I still remember the day in 1975 when I decided to become a healer instead of a farmer,” King’s website states, claiming he developed “new approaches to natural health care, including pure water-based homeopathic medicines.”

Hoffman is well known in New Jersey and elsewhere for his class-action lawsuits, including one that claimed a company misrepresented the effects of its mail-order penis-enlargement product. A New Jersey appeals judge dismissed that case in 2009, saying Hoffman could not sue unless he had used the product.

The Courthouse News database contains 295 lawsuits in which Hoffman is the plaintiff, 256 of them class actions.